Newbie question - $result->value still serialized

The behavior I see does not match the documentation; the very simple example code does not work because the default transcoding of the data from the server is not happening. I should see a PHP object, but I’m just getting a string.

When I try to supply my own transcoder it decodes properly, but on encoding I get unexpected behavior that leads to data loss, even though the string returned by the transcoder function seems to be correct. So, at this point I’m unable to use this SDK.